Negotiating the new Germany : can social partnership survive?

Abstract

The reunification of Germany in 1990 juxtaposed two very different models of industrial relations. This volume assesses the results. By the late-1980s, West Germany had developed and refined a largely collaborative relationship between business and labour, codified in law, that governed industrial relations effectively. How would East German workers, operating within a completely different system for 40 years, respond to West Germany's institutional social partnership? Would western-style social partnership spread to all of the New Germany, or find itself seriously destabilized? The scholars who contributed to this volume are unanimous in their admiration of key elements in the German model. They diverge, however, on their assessments of the resilience of that model in the face of dramatic new challenges in the 1990s. Some emphasize the process of erosion and the current sense of crisis. They cite the strain that enormous resource transfers from West to East created for such social systems as comprehensive collective bargaining, codetermination, vocational training and broad benefits. Other authors are more impressed with the succesful transfer of western institutions to eastern Germany and the basic stability of the social partnership system. The contributors to the volume are: Christopher S. Allen (University of Georgia); Peter Auer (Wissenschaftszentrum, Berlin); Michael Fichter (Freie Universitat, Berlin); Gary Herrigel (University of Chicago); Wade Jacoby (Grinnell College); Mathias Knuth (Institut fur Arbgeit und Technik, Gelsenkirchen); Richard Locke (Massachusetts Institute of Technology); Steven J. Silvia (American University); Lowell Turner (Cornell University); Douglas Webber (INSEAD and European University, Florence); and Kirsten Wever (Rutgers University).

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